How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission

Summary

The last post looked at how geographic biases affect who applies to and gets accepted by UCs. This post is going to going to drill in to how the admissions policy has evolved at one specific campus, UC San Diego, which has been in the news because 8.5% of enrolled freshmen needed remedial math classes. In 2024, Lynbrook High in San Jose was the highest-achieving non-selective high school in the state. 375 seniors (86% of the total) were proficient in both Math and English but only 37 were admitted to UC San Diego. On the other hand, Crawford High, in San Diego, had 38 students admitted even though only 23 (8.6% of the 266 seniors) were proficient in both Math and English. There are literally hundreds of students from Lynbrook who were rejected by UC San Diego despite being stronger than most of those accepted from Crawford. In the popular imagination, we expect students from high achieving schools to be more successful in college admissions. This is no longer true, at least at UC San Diego. The relationship between the academic strength of the students at a school, as measured by the percentage who are proficient in both English and Math, and the chance that those students get admitted to UCSD is extremely low.As the chart shows, UCSD seems to favor some schools at the expense of others with similar achievement levels. The dot in the top right is CAMS (the California Academy of Maths and Sciences). It’s a selective school where over 90% of seniors met or exceeded the standards in both English and Math and nearly 40% of seniors were admitted to UC San Diego. But Gretchen Whitney and Oxford Academy are also selective schools where over 90% of students were proficient in both English and Math and UCSD admitted fewer than 20% of them. Meanwhile, students from Berkeley High have much greater success than students at most other Bay Area schools despite not being better than them in any measurable way.Preuss, Gompers, and Crawford are all in the San Diego area (Preuss is o...